


Unsorted Books

by Sootsprites_in_the_Chimney



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Chronic Pain, Disabled and Queer and here to PINE, F/F, F/M, M/M, Magic bookstore, Multi, Political Commentary, Reader is a disaster gay crushing on two people that are already dating each other, The whole crew makes an appearance, Volfred and Oralech are married and HAPPY, fibromyalgia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-08 11:01:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13456848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sootsprites_in_the_Chimney/pseuds/Sootsprites_in_the_Chimney
Summary: You are a Normal Person, living a Normal Life, because Magic doesn’t exist. Until it does, and your life stops being Normal.





	1. A few hallucinations, maybe.

**Author's Note:**

> I LIVE....HUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUE

You were waist deep in the water when it surfaced: a butter yellow tube with a round sphere at the top, just three feet to your left.

"Huh," you said, frowning at what your mind initially hazarded was a lost inflatable toy modeled after a cartoon character, "now what are  _you_?" You couldn't possibly watch every cartoon that came on television, but surely if a show was popular enough to warrant merchandise you would have at least heard of it. Hoping to figure out what the toy was, you shifted toward it.

The tube turned.

The tube turned, because it wasn't a tube, but rather something  _serpentine_ _,_ and _what kind of sea snake got that big and came this close to shore, or-_ your thoughts sputtered out as the round sphere, i.e.  _the face_ , turned to face you fully. 

It had a single, massive eye, and it was wearing goggles. Or, uh, a single circular lens, so half a pair of goggles?

... _A_ goggle?

"Wait," you squinted at it, for some reason entirely unthreatened by a butter-yellow-sea-serpent-cyclops with protective eye wear, "what?"

The big eye seemed to look past you for a second before catching your gaze, and the body froze.

"You can see this Knight??" It half-asked, half-shouted, and you could only nod numbly because  _what the fuck kind of withdrawal symptom **was this shit**_. A few beats of stunned silence hung between the two of you before, with a yelp, the serpent dove back into the water and vanished.

You'd only been at the beach for about 20 minutes, but decided that it was time to go home.

* * *

There was a sale on rice, and you were trying to decide if you had the will power to try and get two 30 pound bags of rice in your cart when a massive hand reached past you and lifted one of said 30 pound bags of rice as if it were empty.

"I'm sorry, but," you began, putting on your best smile as you turned your head and leaned more heavily against your cart, "may I ask-"

The hand belonged to the tallest person you'd ever seen, with strong features and a meticulously plated blonde braid. And they had  _horns._

Your sentence squeaked to a halt.

Their eyes, ringed with fatigue, met yours. The massive hand paused.

With one hand clutching the handle of your cart with stark white knuckles, you pointed your other hand at stacked bags of rice.

"T....Two?" Your hand trembled in time with your voice. "They're...very heavy. Please?"

They placed the bag they'd already picked up in your cart, and then a second.

"Thank-" You said as they grabbed four bags with the same apparent ease, before turning and striding down and around the aisle and out of sight, "...you."

For a few minutes, you stared at the grocery store's vinyl flooring as other customers moved around you to wrangle a bag of rice into their own carts.

Unlike with what had happened at the beach, when there had been no physical evidence of anything having happened, there were two heavy bags of rice in your cart. You stared at them and gave your back a cautiously experimental twist - sore, because you were always sore, but it was the soreness of inhabiting your body, without the additional pain that always followed bending and lifting.

You had  _definitely_ heard hooves.

You considered calling your therapist.

* * *

Your therapist was out of town and you didn’t want to bother with someone new, so the next day you decided to sit in a park near your apartment and practice not hallucinating. Or at least practice noticing hallucinations.

Everything went fine for the first hour; people jogged by, pushed strollers and walked their dogs. Off to your left, a group of young people argued (loudly) about the merits of ‘fun’ media versus media ‘with a message’, and kids ran around with their friends and yelled in that way that was probably meant to convey enjoyment but was also just really shrill and loud.

...maybe being in public was the problem? It had only happened twice, but that was twice in a week without any prior history of audio/visual hallucinations.

On the other hand, ‘hide in your apartment until the visions stop’ sounded dumb and bad. 

There was a jangle somewhere behind you that your brain immediately interpreted as _DOG!!_ and, temporarily soothed by the idea of getting to see a good good pup up close, you glanced over your shoulder with a smile.

Behind the bench you were sitting on was a handsome man and a dog with a comically - yet impeccably - styled mustache.

”Are you _sure_ this matches my outfit?” The dog fretted, lifting a paw (with alarming flexibility) to bat at the soft leather collar fastened loosely around its neck.

”Rukey,” the man said in a tone that suggested this was maybe the hundredth time he’d had to say this exact sentence, “you aren’t _wearing_ anything else. That’s literally all you have on.”

The dog huffed and theatrically threw himself to the ground, sprawled on his side. “Hedwyn, don’t you understand that an outfit is a state of _being_?”

They bicker-bantered for another minute, with quite a lot of ‘you’re being dramatic’ and ‘don’t mock my indignity!’ specifically, before the dog turned his head, mouth open for another retort and your eyes met.

”Hedwyn,” the mustached dog, Rukey apparently, looked back at the handsome man with a grin, “I have stunned yet another surfacer with my devilish good looks.”

The man presumably named Hedwyn narrowed his eyes at Rukey in a ‘behave yourself’ way, then looked up at you with an effortlessly careless smile. Like he hadn’t just been talking to a dog.

A dog with a mustache.

”Hi.”

Were they both hallucinations? Or were they an actual guy with his dog that you just hallucinated talking to each other?

”Miss?”

You squinted at the man’s expression as it shifted from casual warmth to mild confusion, maybe wariness, then looked back at the dog.

”I think the collar matches.”

They both stared at you, and you stared back, trying to figure out if you were weirding out a totally normal guy and his dog or weirding out anyone who happened to pass by and see you talking to thin air.

”...We should talk,” said the man, as the dog whined, ”Jodi wasn’t messing with us?!”

And you kept your composure until he reached for you, until you _felt_ his hand on your arm because _apparently some part of this was actually fucking happening_. 

“Nope,” you were suddenly standing upright, arms tightly folded over your midsection, “nope,” you spun on your heel as the man asked you to wait, “nope,” you strode away, “nope!”


	2. A Visitor Pets Your Cat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your cat will graciously accept affection from anyone.

It was still dark when you woke up and when you checked your phone - hissing at the sudden brightness of the screen - it was apparently 3:00am.

Groggy, you shoved your phone back under your pillow and tried to figure out why you were awake.

You didn’t need to pee - except once you thought about it, your bladder seemed to think it was a good idea regardless. As you stood and stretched you noted that you weren’t in an abnormal amount of pain (for you), so that wasn’t likely to be the cause either.

Groping through the dim for the wall, which you shuffled along toward the bathroom, it wasn’t until after you’d peed and shuffled back to your bed that you realized your cat, Pecan, hadn’t come running for attention when you were trapped on the toilet. Or, as you jokingly referred to it, ‘the petting throne’.

”Pecan,” you called softly, finally rubbing the sleep from your eyes and snagging your glasses from the nightstand, “where-“

Your balcony door was open. And, assuming that it being open and the silhouette just beyond weren’t more fucking hallucinations, someone was on your balcony.

”I live on the third floor,” you reasoned under your breath, taking off your glasses to roughly rub at your eyes again, “and I haven’t lowered the fire escape in months.”

The shape was still there when you put your glasses back on and, much to your chagrin, a smaller and much more familiar shape appeared to be on the balcony railing beside it. 

With a detached acceptance born of poor sleep and a week of exhaustingly heightened anxiety, you considered the three most likely probabilities. 

First, you were actually asleep and having a worryingly realistic lucid dream. Or nightmare. Given your lack of a history of lucid dreaming, this was unlikely.

Second, the hallucinations of the past week had actually been symptoms of the rapid onset of some new facet of your neurological cocktail of anxiety and depression - or as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning.

But while the internet didn’t rule out the possibility of mild hallucinations related to anxiety, none of yours had followed an anxiety attack or, really, any periods of heightened stress.

And all of the carbon monoxide detectors in the building had been checked last month, and yours had never gone off.

Third, there was someone on your balcony, possibly petting your cat.

You considered which possibility would be preferable, only half aware of your legs carrying you toward the open glass balcony door, and you were still undecided when you came to a stop just inside the doorway.

The lights of the street below gave more definition to the shape standing on your balcony, and your eyes darted from humanoid face to wings.

”Ah,” you said, frowning. Another hallucination, but it was still unclear whether or not you were looking at an actual person that your brain put wings on, or just staring at space. Someone had to have opened the balcony door...maybe you had?

”Not that I mind being admired,” said a lyrical and feminine voice, presumably the hallucination, “but you don’t seem terribly surprised to find a stranger on your balcony.”

From his spot on the railing, Pecan greeted you with a soft ‘meeeeee’, then continued rubbing against the hallucination’s half extended wing. 

Were you imagining Pecan doing that, or was that a sign that someone was actually there?

’Maybe,’ some part of you suggested more than a touch manically, ‘everything has been a dream! I still live at home with my parents with a useless degree and no job history, and-‘

“You’re not sleep walking, are you?”

You glanced back to their face, the sharp features thrown into sharply contrasted edges of light and shadow by the street lights below. The eyes were lost in those shadows, but you could clearly see the lips quirk into something teasing.

”I don’t know, actually?” You muttered, once again taking your glasses off and rubbing at your eyes. “I’ve been hallucinating all week, never done that before, and now it’s...they’re everywhere.”

”Hallucinating, you say?” Hummed the hallucination, lightly tapping a feather against their cheek. “What have you seen, exactly? Have you talked to anyone about it?”

”A snake, uh,” admitting it aloud both made your breathe come easier and your legs shake, and you half shuffled, half fell toward and into the cheap plastic lawn chair you kept on the balcony for temperate nights, “it was such a bright yellow, and a person...such a tall person, they had this blonde braid and, and horns!”

The hallucination hummed again, and you felt the weight of their eyes heavy upon your face.

”I asked them to help me put rice in my cart, and then there was rice in my cart and they were gone and-“

”Was this ‘hallucination’ attractive?” The hallucination interrupted, and when you looked up they were closer than before. Pecan, apparently miffed that he was no longer getting attention, hopped down from the balcony railing, padded over to you and climbed into your lap.

His purring was soothingly familiar and jarringly real.

”Uh, I was a little...distracted, but. Yes?”

“I thought so.” The hallucination chuckled, then extended a wing at you. “Did you see anything else...interesting, this week?”

“A guy and a dog,” you said, slowly stroking Pecan’s increasingly arched back, “they were, like...talking. I mean, they were arguing about fashion-“ the hallucination laughed softly, “-and the dog had a mustache. I...I talked to them, and the guy...”

Your hands slowed as you stared at them, and you only half heard Pecan’s complaint.

”I felt him touch my hand.”

”You found that distressing?”

”Well, YEAH, hallucinations might be a new development but I’m pretty sure they aren’t supposed to-“

Feathers grazed your neck and you jerked back to find the hallucination bent over you, wings instead of forearms extended on either side of you, face obscured by the shadow of their bobbed hair.

Ice shot down your spine, and suddenly you didn’t feel like you were alone on your balcony, complaining to thin air.

”I asked if you’d spoken to anyone about what you’d seen,” they reminded you, a feather casually caressing your cheek, “have you?”

“I...” Goosebumps prickled up and down your arms. “My therapist isn’t...who else would I have...”

The hallucination tilted their head, one delicately tapered ear and the curve of a cheekbone and jaw suddenly in stark relief under the moonlight.

”...No.”

For an instant you thought this hallucination-or-maybe-not would fall upon you, but instead they drew away, a tinkling laugh filling the air they vacated.

”That’s good to hear, but...surely you want to talk to someone who can help?”

You nodded numbly, eyes wide and hands quivering.

”Of course you do.” The hallucination-but-maybe-a-nightmare cooed and, with a nimbleness you wouldn’t have expected from something with wings instead of hands, they pulled a card from somewhere and pressed it flat against your chest, just below your clavicle.

You could feel the frantic thumping of your heart against the cardstock as it was held against your skin, and you could only assume they could feel it too.

”Stop by tomorrow, hm? Whenever you’re free.”

You could only nod again.

”Good girl - now, I think you best get back to bed.”

* * *

 The next thing you knew, your phone was playing Never Gonna Give You Up at maximum volume to alert you that it was 7:30am, and thus time to get the fuck out of bed.

Blearily, you groped under your pillow for your cell phone, snoozed the alarm and shoved it back.

Last night’s dream had been a mess of starkly realistic backdrops overlayed with surrealist imagery and fear, and you took several minutes to center yourself.

”Doctor Varhad should be back in the office today,” you said to yourself between deep breaths, “just gotta call and verify my appointment.”

You rolled over and reached for your glasses on the nightstand, “just gotta call-", and the first thing your fingers touched on the nightstand was cardstock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huehuehuehuehuehuehuehue


	3. You guess there’s a Subway Entrance there now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You find a new Subway entrance and meet a very talkative tree that either has green lips, or wears green lipstick.

When you tip-toed out of bed, you found your balcony door locked from the inside and a strikingly long magenta feather held down by a leg of your balcony chair on its quill.

Pecan twined between your ankles,  _mrrrrr_ ing his good morning and a reminder that the sun was up so it was definitely breakfast time. Only upon reaching the kitchen and going to open his food container did you realize that the card you’d found on your bedside table that morning was clutched so tightly in one fist that it resembled a bow tie. Once Pecan’s breakfast was poured and his water refeshed, you flattened the card back into legibility on your kitchen counter.

_The Glade Of Lu_ , read a neat but elaborate cursive script across the top,  _Primary Source of Tomes, Texts and Grimoires for the Novice and the Learned._

”Meee?” Pecan, having inhaled his food, leapt onto the kitchen counter to rub his head against your chin, and you reflexively bent to kiss his forehead before asking,

”Pecan, do you remember meeting someone new last night?”

He purred and butted your hand, which was always appreciated but not particularly helpful in that instance. Regardless, you knew he was trying his best, and paused your existential crisis to give him some quality scratching.

* * *

_Corner of Cass and 30th, Downside,_ read the flip side of the card in the same script as the front. You could only assume that ‘Downside’ was just a fancy way of saying ‘basement’, to better fit the image and atmosphere of what you guessed was some kind of occult supplies store.

Which wasn’t a problem, because every Wiccan you’d ever met had been very pleasant, and you’d been to plenty of hipster bookstores and coffee shops in your time that tried desperately to foster an atmosphere that was both unique and mysterious but still accessible, because...still gotta pay the bills. What was a problem, however, was that there couldn’t be any basement bookstores on the corner of Cass and 30th, because there weren’t any buildings on the corner of Cass and 30th; the area was in gentrification limbo from three years back, when a bunch of cheap and accessible residential properties were bought up to be demolished and turned into 2k a month apartments, and the company only got as far as the demolition.

What was an even bigger problem, however, was that something you could only describe as a Subway Entrance now sat at the edge of one of the vacant lots. 

Your town did not have a Subway system.

”Cool,” you said, looking around for the umpteenth time in hopes of spotting someone peaking around a corner to jump out and shout, ‘It was all a prank, hahaha isn’t gaslighting funny??’, but no one was around. You were alone. “Cool,” you repeated, frowning at the Subway Entrance. 

Maybe it was just a ditch, some big fucking hole that you were imagining was a Subway Entrance, and if you walked up to it you’d fall once and break your neck. 

Maybe you hadn’t been having hallucinations all week.

”Cool and fucking great,” you muttered, shoving the card into your purse as you strode toward the stairs. When no one popped out at you, you took a deep breath, and started down.

* * *

You didn’t remember reaching the bottom of the stairs. In fact, you didn’t remember anything after the third step, and you briefly worried that you actually HAD fallen and broken your neck until a voice said,

”Hello, child.”

You looked up to find that you stood just outside a fence, your hand on the smooth wood of the gate, and inside the fence was a yard. A garden, rather, and beyond the garden was a square brick building.

You didn’t immediately notice much else about the building, because a tree right on the other side of the gate was talking to you.

”Hi...tree?” You frowned, watching a branch that was actually an arm and twigs that were actually fingers on a hand, before you craned your neck to look up into the face of not-a-tree. “Huh.”

”You don’t seem frightened.” The tree stated, regarding you with calm, calculating eyes and steepled fingers.

”I don’t know if I...have feelings right now.” You furrowed your brow. Was it - Were THEY holding a pipe? Should a tree smoke? Did this tree have lungs? “Should I be? Frightened?”

The tree hummed non-commitally, and you considered being frightened.

Your eyes flickered past the tree’s face, and you squinted at a light that wasn’t the sun - several lights, actually, bright and inset against...stone?

”Are we underground?” You asked, staring up at what appeared to be the domed sealing of a cave, covered in sky blue mosaic tiles and lit as if it were a sunny day by a few evenly spaced and brightly shining tiles.

”No. And yes.” 

“Could you be less obtuse?” You muttered, blinking away splotches on your vision from the lights (glowing tiles?) above as your eyes flicked back to the tree’s face.

The tree’s lips quirked into a slight smile, and you realized their lips were green.

Or they were wearing green lipstick. 

They opened their mouth to speak, only to close it and look over their shoulder as the door to the building behind them opened. You leaned to the side to look past them at the sound, and saw a massive horned person stoop through the doorway and out into the garden.

It wasn’t the same horned person you’d seen in the grocery store, as rather than a single set of curling black horns, this one had two sets of horns of striking blue, draped with crimson fabric that rose out of white blond hair. 

“Volfred,” they called ahead as they approached, eyes intent on whatever they were holding, “one of the books that Barker requested seems to have eaten another book that it was stored with, and I can’t find-“ they looked up as they came to stop beside the tree person, presumably Volfred, and their eyes fell on you, “Oh, hello.”

"Hello," you replied automatically and then added, after noting the startled expression on the tree's - Volfred's? - face, "would you ask Volfred to be less obtuse?"

Because you were either dead or talking to yourself on the corner of a vacant lot, so why not be cheeky?

The horned person eyed you for a fraction of a second before, with a heavy sigh and a sag of their shoulders that seemed  _practiced_ , they looked again to the - to Volfred. "Is this why you've been standing about out here since this morning? So you could catch your guest at the gate and be cryptic at her?"

"How rude," Volfred replied with a slight rise of his chin.

"Guest?" You echoed, pointing at yourself incredulously - the somewhat hazy quality of this place from moments ago had been entirely dispelled as you took in the body language of these two otherworldly persons, and couldn't help but think of them as a gently bickering couple. You watched as the horned person, still frowning, placed a hand against what you would assume approximated the small of Volfred's back.

Not your imagination, then.

"Pamitha left you with the invitation, yes? That's how you found the address, and the gate?" The horned person tilted their head down at you, crimson fabric draped across their horns swaying with the motion.

"Pamitha?" The winged silhouette from your balcony last night came to mind and, equally hesitant about being wrong or being right, you dug into your purse until your fingers brushed the feather you'd found only an hour or two ago - assuming you hadn't lost any time in...wherever this was. You gingerly drew the magenta feather out and held it toward the couple, and asked again, "Pamtiha?"

Head still tilted, crimson fabric fluttering in some minor breeze, "Why don't you come in? You and my husband have much to discuss."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can say from experience that it's hard to be taken seriously when your partner is busy calling you out for being a dumbass.


End file.
